Saturday, July 30, 2016

Patience

When I was a child I would pray a lot. And one of the things I would pray for was patience. I was always in a rush. I wanted everything to happen when I thought it should happen. I think it's part of being a kid. But I'll never forget my mom taking me aside one day and saying, "God can't just give you patience. The only way for God to answer that prayer is to put you in situations where you have to be patient." It made so much sense. I wasn't sure why I'd never thought of it before. After that day I never once prayed for patience again.

But I must have prayed enough that God must have already gotten the order because I grew up to be an author. There is no other profession I've ever heard of that requires more patience. You have to have patience to write a book. It takes patience while others are beta reading your books. And there is a significant amount of patience needed while you are waiting for the book to be accepted or rejected. But that's not all. Even if your book is accepted there is the time between acceptance, contract negotiations, edits, and release.

I've been published for something like seven years now. Sorry I didn't have an exact date. I didn't know what I was going to blog about before I sat down this morning so I didn't look up my first publication date. But I remember how hard it was to wait at every stage when I first started. Over the years, however, it has become easier. And this morning I realized I've had a proposal out for almost three weeks and I've been totally chill about it. I haven't been checking my email every five seconds. I haven't been obsessing about it. This is a relatively new experience for me. I'm being remarkably patient about this submission.

So I guess God does answers prayers. But, when the request is patience, he takes his time about it.

2 comments:

I am grateful for your post as I am waiting almost 6 weeks to find out if my second book will be accepted by my publisher and I have been checking email every 6 seconds. I also have two stories out for anthologies. I hope your kind of patience comes to me soon.